Today is the anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Gettysburg, the battle that, combined with the fall of Vicksburg to Grant on July 4th in 1863, broke the back of the Confederacy, though the war would go on for almost two more years. Here’s an interesting story about the fiftieth reunion. Two years from today will be the sesquicentennial. Needless to say, there will be no veterans of the battle attending. Or if there are, they would be interesting medical curiosities, from which we might learn a lot about longevity.
Category Archives: History
Seven Years Ago Today
I should have posted this earlier, and it’s hard to believe it’s been that long, but I drove up to Mojave on the twentieth of June, 2004, to see the first flight of SpaceShipOne into space. I put up several blog posts about it, starting with this one. Just consecutively click on the next post (at the top of the page) to see them all, along with links to other posts.
Give Me A Large Government That Spends My Money To Tell Me What To Do
..or give me death. The real story of the Founding of the nation, by Frank J.
[Update a few minutes later]
Related: Will the Democrats destroy us all?
Only if we let them.
It Doesn’t Look Like The Depression
Color photographs of the thirties. I always think of the world as being black and white back then, because that’s what all the photos are. It kind of reminds me of this classic exchange between Calvin and his dad:
Calvin: How come old photographs are always black and white? Didn’t they have color film back then?
Dad: Sure they did. In fact, those old photographs are in color. It’s just that the world was black and white then. The world didn’t turn color until sometime in the 1930s, and it was pretty grainy color for a while, too.
Calvin: But then why are old paintings in color?! If the world was black and white, wouldn’t artists have painted it that way?
Dad: Not necessarily. A lot of great artists were insane.
Calvin: But… But how could they have painted in color anyway? Wouldn’t their paints have been shades of gray back then?
Dad: Of course, but they turned colors like everything else did in the ’30s.
Calvin: So why didn’t old black and white photos turn color too?
Dad: Because they were color pictures of black and white, remember?
That kid’s going to need a therapist.
What Sarah Palin Got Wrong
Thoughts from a Revere historian.
I agree with him that one of Palin’s character flaws is an inability to admit error. It’s one she shares with the president.
It Couldn’t Possibly Be Because She Knows History
See, when Sarah Palin gets something right that her critics get wrong, it’s just because she’s lucky:
Patrick Leehey of the Paul Revere House said Revere was probably bluffing his British captors, but reluctantly conceded that it could be construed as Revere warning the British.
“I suppose you could say that,” Leehey said. “But I don’t know if that’s really what Mrs. Palin was referring to.”
McConville said he also is not convinced that Palin’s remarks reflect scholarship.
“I would call her lucky in her comments,” McConville said.
Well, I think I have to go with the professor here:
But Cornell law professor William Jacobson, who asserted last week that Palin was correct, linking to Revere quotes on his conservative blog Legalinsurrection.com, said Palin’s critics are the ones in need of a history lesson. “It seems to be a historical fact that this happened,” he said. “A lot of the criticism is unfair and made by people who are themselves ignorant of history.”
OK, but at least they understand business, and economics, and world affairs. Right? I mean, they are our moral and intellectual superiors. We can be sure of this because they tell us so.
[Update a few minutes later]
Now who looks stupid? They never realize how stupid they look. It’s part of the problem of stupidity. Anyway they’re being stupid doesn’t fit the narrative.
Two Thirds Of A Century
I remember when I was a kid, and my mother saying, “I can’t believe it’s been thirty years since D-Day.” She had been a WAC, stationed in Egypt at the time. My father (whom she had not yet met) was shooting at Messerschmitts and other German fighters from the waist of a B-25 over Italy, Romania and other eastern European countries. The success of the invasion was the beginning of the end of the war in Europe and, despite the last gasp at the Battle of the Bulge the following winter, essentially sealed Germany’s fate.
Well, she’s gone now (for over twenty years), as is my dad (over thirty) and so are most of the participants in that event. The youngest of them are in their mid-eighties, and slowly, the greatest, most destructive war in history is passing from living memory. How many veterans of Gettysburg were still alive in 1930? That battle, combined with the fall of Vicksburg, Mississippi to Grant the day after that famous union victory, similarly sealed the fate of the Confederacy. It is said that after Reconstruction, Vicksburg refused to fly an American flag for decades, until the thirties. If so, it’s probably because, by then, few were around to remember that ignominious and infamous day in the city’s history.
The passing of that generation would be less poignant, and unsettling, if we were preserving their memories, and properly teaching our children history. But given the disastrous state of both public education and academia, we cannot rely on the next generation knowing anything about that longest day:
I playfully launched in to a mock exam, using the small images of each of the war’s principals from the front cover. “Okay, who’s this?” I demanded, pointing to the visage of Winston Churchill.
From my friend, silence. And a blank stare. ”Uh, alright,” I hesitated unevenly, “how about him?” I pointed to Stalin.
“Oh, Franklin Roosevelt, I think,” offered my friend earnestly.
Mental panic was setting in. “And this?” I pointed to Hirohito.
“ . . . Gandhi?”
Our impromptu exam ended with howls of laughter from my chair, and a red face in the other.
You don’t need to be a history fanatic to recognize most of those men. And if you’re, say, an elementary-ed student expected to teach the subject, it’s helpful to know the subject, right? And preferably before you pick up a book on it . . . “for kids.”
But here’s the thing: my friend is smart. An “A” student, attending a respected university.
For all the talk about lesson planning, creative learning, compassionate engagement, etc., from the education reform crowd, how often is it asked: Do our teachers know their subjects?
Sadly, the answer in many cases is “no.” Worse yet, the texts are too focused on the contributions of lesbians and African-Americans and Siberian-Americans and on how awful and wart-filled is our history (we enslaved people, but didn’t lose six-hundred thousand white men to free them) to pay attention to things like the ideas of those evil slave-holding Founders, or the people who stormed a beach sixty-seven years ago to liberate a continent from totalitarianism. And the price we’ll pay for it in the future may well be the need for another D-Day, particularly when we have a president who seems to be unfamiliar with that history, or that of the Middle East.
[Update a while later]
Here is Ernie Pyle’s dispatch, published almost a week after the fact.
[Update early afternoon]
More D-Day memories. There are as many amazing stories from that war as there were participants. I’m actually a little surprised that there are as many as 1.7M vets left.
A Modest Proposal
Like many such things, easier said than done.
One bonus, though, is that we wouldn’t have to listen to Barack Obama say Pahk-ee-stahn any more
Sputnik, And Apollo
Over at NRO, Jonah Goldberg points out the ridiculousness of the administration’s attempts to leverage the bin Laden killing to promote its domestic agenda, but in doing so, he misses a crucial point about the president’s historical confusion in the State of the Union:
Which brings us back to salmon regulations, immigration, high-speed rail, renewable energy, and other action items on Obama’s “win the future” agenda laid out in January’s address. Back then, Obama said we were in a “Sputnik moment,” referring to the time when the Soviet Union’s launch of a satellite inspired the Apollo space program and increased spending on scientific education and research.
…the most bestest part, as Brennan might say, is the simple fact that the president doesn’t know how we’ll “win the future.” In his Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill, Obama explained that we don’t know how we’ll get where we need to go or what the destination will even look like.
But that’s the genius of the Sputnik analogy. Since, as Obama explained, “we had no idea how we would beat (the Soviets) to the moon,” it’s okay that we don’t know how to “win the future.” And that in turn means that during the weakest recovery in half a century, we can blow billions on mythical green-energy jobs, push a government takeover of health care, encourage skyrocketing gas prices, impose crippling regulations and higher taxes, and make “investments” in white elephants and high-speed salmon.
To clarify, Sputnik did not in fact give us Apollo, though it did kick off the space race, so to conflate Sputnik with not knowing how we would beat the Soviets to the moon is historically ignorant. Apollo occurred not as a direct result of Sputnik, but as a result of Yuri Gagarin beating us at getting a man into space (on April 12th, 1961, three and a half years after Sputnik), the embarrassment of the Bay of Pigs fiasco a few days later, resulting in a need to show that we were still in the game internationally, and our (final) success in getting a man into space ourselves (though not orbit) on May 5th, boosting our confidence. Twenty days after that (the fiftieth anniversary is coming up in a few days), Kennedy announced the goal of sending a man to the moon and back by the end of the decade. So even if you buy the president’s absurd logic in attempting to contextualize Apollo, it would have made much more sense to talk about our “Gagarin moment,” not our “Sputnik moment.”
And of course, as I’ve written before, anyone who uses the hackneyed phrase “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we…” almost always makes an inappropriate analogy in the process.
Born In The USA
…or at least, if not there, bin Laden’s ideas were born in the West.
Not surprising, really. Most ideas that kill millions were born in the West. The West has nurtured both great good, and great evil.
For example, where do you think that Pol Pot got his ideas? In Cambodia? Nope. In Paris. Just the place to marinate in the moldering monstrous themes of Rousseau and the Terror.
While Marx was a westerner, he fermented his deadly memes and wrote his most damaging works in London, a city that has had Marxists as mayor in recent history. Even Mao, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history, was influenced by him.
What is particularly poisonous about radical Islam is how it has wed the ancient warmongering of Mohammed with more modern totalitarianism (though in a sense, you could say that Mohammed, with his intrinsic melding of religion and state, invented totalitarianism), and how comfortable the left seems to be with it, decrying “apartheid” in Israel, a nation that has Arabs in its legislature, while ignoring the true gender apartheid of the Arab culture. The alliance between the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and national socialism in Germany during the war was not isolated, or a coincidence.
[Via Ed Driscoll, who has more links]